Grayslake North's start is super

Considering there haven't even been four full seasons of basketball played at Grayslake North, record-keeping is fairly easy.

Not a lot of numbers to keep track of yet.

Consequently, coach Todd Grunloh, who was hired when the school opened in 2006, didn't need much time to come up with the answer to Friday's statistical question of the night.

Has Grayslake North ever shut out an opponent for an entire quarter?

"Yep, last season," Grunloh responded in the blink of an eye.

In a Thanksgiving tournament game in November of 2008 against Richmond-Burton, the Knights ended the first quarter with a 21-0 lead.

The reason that question was asked of Grunloh in the first place?

The Knights had just put together another shutout. Only this one was even more lopsided.

Grayslake North took a month's worth of frustration out on visiting Woodstock by steamrolling to a 27-0 advantage at the end of the first quarter.

The domination continued and ultimately the Knights walked away with a breezy 67-25 Fox Valley Conference Fox Division victory that ended a painfully long drought at home.

Grayslake North (8-9, 3-3)hadn't won a game on its own floor in 57 days. That dates back to a Dec. 3 win over Cary-Grove.

"We came out really intense because we really wanted this win," said Grayslake North junior guard Teddy Ludwick, who scored 15 points on three 3-pointers. "We wanted this one bad. This was a good win for us."

The Knights are now 3-4 at home and are hoping to be at least .500 for the season, a feat they've yet to achieve in the program's history.

"We've been talking about that a lot," said Grayslake North guard Matt Pucher, who scored all but 2 of his game-high 20 points in the first three quarters. "We wanted to get another win here.

"The quick start helped a lot, the 27-0 lead. We were on. It boosted our confidence, even though we knew they were without their best player."

Woodstock (5-14, 1-4) was minus junior forward Mike Sutter, who is out for the season and will likely be undergoing shoulder surgery soon. He recently tore his rotator cuff.

Sutter was averaging a team-high 17 points and 7 rebounds per game.

To add insult to injury, the Blue Streaks also had to do without senior guard Townshend Peters, who had been playing in place of Sutter. He went down early in the first quarter at Grayslake North after taking an elbow to the face.

He may have suffered a broken nose.

"That injury to Sutter is a big injury. It really hurts them because he's one of the better kids in the conference," Grunloh said. "But with the pressure we put on them tonight, you'd like to think (Sutter alone probably wouldn't have made a difference). We got some real easy points. I think we got 12 in the first quarter just on breakaways.

"We talked about it right from the start, just jumping on them early. We wanted to get their confidence down right away and pretty much seal the deal in the first quarter."

In the fateful first quarter, Woodstock missed all seven of its shots and turned the ball over 11 times.

For the game, Woodstock committed 25 turnovers and connected on only 9-of-50 shots from the field for a sickly 18-percent clip.

The Blue Streaks finally scored their first points of the game with 7:25 left in the second quarter when Alex Laing hit a 3-pointer.

"We've lost a little bit of our identity with Mike and Townshend out," said Woodstock coach Alex Baker, who didn't get double-figure scoring from a single player. "But we also missed a lot of shots tonight and our offense got stagnant.

"Once you get down by as many as we did, it takes a lot to get back into it."

After the first quarter, the smallest the Woodstock deficit got was 22 points, which happened early in the second quarter.

"Coach always stresses not to let teams back into games and that's what we've done too many times this year. We've given up some big leads," Pucher said. "That didn't happen tonight."

Warren 51, Zion-Benton 47: The visiting Blue Devils pulled off the upset in North Suburban Lake Division action, rallying from a 40-35 deficit after three quarters.

Warren, which also stunned Mundelein earlier in the week, improved to 6-10 overall and 4-4 in the NSC Lake.

Zion-Benton, which shared first place with idle Lake Forest coming into the game, fell to 6-3 in the division.